Edit with the sceneline and the timeline to bring together your movie

What You'll Need:

>> Adobe Premiere Elements 11 or later
>> Some footage
>> 30 minutes

Difficulty: Easy

Like Apple with iMovie, Adobe has tried to simplify the editing process in order to cater to a wider audience than ‘prosumers’ and professional filmmakers. With so many videos being uploaded to YouTube, in order to stand out from the crowd you need to have a polished product. And the only way to achieve this is by editing your clips as opposed to merely uploading raw footage.

But editing takes time, so the quicker you can cut your piece together the better. As a result, Adobe came up with two ways of seeing your edit: the sceneline and the timeline. The latter is the traditional editing concept: the length of the clip depends on its duration and you can move clips around, and even place them on different layers (so that the top layer obscures the bottom one – it’s a convenient way of exploring which clip works best without having to re-edit the whole project). You have so much freedom that you can even create gaps between clips where the viewer only sees darkness. (This can of course be intentional or an unfortunate slip-up.)

By contrast, the sceneline is much more simplistic, illustrated by its large, chunky thumbnails that represent your chosen clips. No matter how long the clip is, its dimension remains the same on the screen – veteran iMovie users will see similarities to its old interface.

You can’t separate a clip’s audio from its video, nor can you work with multiple layers of video, for instance. Crippled though this view may be, it also makes editing incredibly simple: you can drag your clips onto the sceneline, reorder them with ease and even delete some you don’t need. It’s also a great way to create a rough edit of your project. However, there will come a time when you’ll have to focus on your edit and fine-tune it, which means an inevitable trip to the timeline.

In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to perform basic editing with the sceneline and how the timeline differs. This is especially true when moving and trimming clips straight from that section of the interface. You may find both convenient depending on which stage of the editing process you happen to be in.

Work with the Sceneline

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Work with the Sceneline and the Timeline

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  From Scene to Time

  By default, Premiere Elements presents your workspace as a sceneline, the simplified editing concept. But switching between it and the timeline is easy: click on Timeline at the top-left to get rid of those big thumbnails and see a more traditional editing layout.

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  Zooming in

  You may find your clips bunched up to the left and too small to see, let alone edit them properly. To zoom into them, either drag this section’s upper right slider to the right, or use the ‘+’ and ‘-’ keyboard shortcuts to zoom in and out. There is no ‘Zoom to Fit’ command.

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  Trimming

  Trimming a clip in the timeline is easy. Move the cursor to an edit point and notice it changing as you hover either side of that edit: drag from the left to lengthen or shorten the left clip. To perform the same action for the right clip, drag from the right of the edit point.

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  Mind the Gap

  All other clips move along automatically so you don’t overlap your edits or create gaps – unless you want to. For instance, drag your last clip to the right and you’ll create a space in your film where no video is shown. You could, for instance, extend one clip’s audio over that gap.

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  Bridging Audio

  By default, a clip’s audio is linked to its video, so if you extend or shorten it, the video will be affected similarly. To make your audio last longer than its video clip, you need to separate them: select a clip then go to Clip > Unlink Audio and Video to alter them independently.

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  Layers

  Timeline offers the ability to work with up to three video and audio layers. Placing a clip on top of another will obscure the lowest one, so you can check if one clip works better than another without removing the original. It’s even possible to resize and reposition your top clip in order to see both the top and bottom clips at the same time. Ctrl-click on the top clip and choose Show Properties to see its modifiable parameters.

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  Quick Tip

  Trimming a clip is incredibly useful, but sometimes you need to cut one in half, perhaps to insert another in between. To do this, move the playhead to the desired position then go to Timeline > Split Clip or use the command+K shortcut.

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